Anarchism and Feminism: Book Review
The following is S.E. Parker's review of the biography of Voltairine de Cleyre written by Paul Avrich,
entitled, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de
Cleyre. James J. Martin made
some interesting comments about the subject anent his notion
about temperament in an interview published elsewhere in these
pages. Also Sharon Presley makes
reference to her in her fine article about feminism in
Liberty, which see.
Voltairine de Cleyre
By S.E. Parker
Voltairine de Cleyre is one of the most unjustly
neglected figures of American radicalism. Essayist, poet,
translator, and orator she played a prominent part in the
libertarian movement between 1887 and her death in 1912 at the
age of 45.
It is for this reason that I welcome Paul
Avrich's well-written and serious biographical study. In it he
vividly depicts her struggles to assert herself as a free
individual, her relations with her comrades and the evolution of
her thought. He also gives us fascinating sketches of some of
her close friends and corrects the errors made by Emma Goldman
and Hippolyte Havel in their biographical essays about her.
Voltairine de Cleyre began her public life as a
lecturer in the freethought movement. She became interested in
anarchism as a result of the Chicago Affair of 1886 and at first
championed the ideas of Benjamin Tucker, to whose paper
Liberty she contributed. She soon came under the
influence of her friend and lover Dyer D. Lum, however, who, like
Tucker, was a mutualist, but favoured militant participation in
trade union struggles. Towards the end of her life she began to
work closely with the libertarian communists, but refused to
commit herself to their ideas, preferring to call herself an "anarchist without adjectives" and adopting a pluralist view of
any future "free society." Indeed, Paul Avrich shows
conclusively that, despite claims by Rudolf Rocker and Emma
Goldman, she did not embrace communism. But I am not convinced
that her efforts to maintain a balance between individualism and
communism rested on any sure foundation. My own experience is
that one eventually has to choose one or the other and I chose
individualism.
In this connection, Voltairine de Cleyre's
attitude towards philosophical egoism is significant. Her
mentor, Dyer D. Lum, believed that the "devotee of a cause is
never the devotee of self" and he sneeringly dismissed egoists as
"dung-beetles," "people who think a great deal of their ego and
don't care a rap for society." In her obituary essay about him,
written after his suicide in 1893, she describes his views
without any dissent so one may take it that she then agreed with
them. In her later writings, however, she began to stress the
importance of thinking "a great deal" of one's ego. Even in one
of her most "Tolstoyan" essays, Crime and Punishment, she
wrote "I believe that the purpose of life (insofar as we can give
it purpose, and it has none save what we give it) is the
assertion and the development of strong, self-centred
personality." In Anarchism and Literature, not only does
she ? Max Stirner by stating that "none can decide...for you so
well as you for yourself; for even if you err you learn by it,
while if he errs the blame is his, and if he advises well the
credit is his, and you are nothing," but she pays tribute to him
as "the pride of Young Germany who would have the individual
acknowledge nothing, neither science nor logic, not any other
creation of his thought, as having authority over him, its
creator."
Nonetheless, despite her recognition of the value
of egocentricity, Voltairine de Cleyre remained haunted to the
end of her life by a religious concern for the sacredness of
principles, the notion that one has to serve a "cause" greater
than oneself. Two years before her death she wrote one of her
most impressive essays, The Dominant Idea, which shows
very clearly the conflicting strains of her thought. She praises
the "liberty and pride and strength of the single soul" and "the
immortal fire of Individual Will which is the salvation of the
future." At the same time she holds up for emulation that most
obnoxious source of support for authority, the view that "to
conceive a higher thing than oneself and live towards that is the
only way of living worthily." Indeed, she concludes her essay by
transforming "Individual Will" into her "Dominant Idea" and thus
negates it.
It is not surprising that not long after writing
this essay she became overwhelmed by a bleak despair about her
life and ideas. Her vain attempt to walk the philosophical
tightrope between egoism and altruism, the profane and the
sacred, eventually crumbled. She found emotional refuge from her
dilemmas in the shape of the Mexican Revolution which "at any
moment of our lives...may invade our homes with its stern demand
for self-sacrifice and suffering." Abandoning her critical
awareness, she plunged into a frenzied campaign to rally support
for the Mexican revolutionaries whom she idealised in a manner
beyond belief in one so intelligent. She died before she could
witness the revolution ending in a mere change of rulers, as is
the melancholy habit of such ventures.
The life and ideas of Voltairine de Cleyre offer
much of interest to individualists. She came so near to adopting
a thoroughgoing individualist position, but sadly could not
overcome the religious-collectivist nonsense she had imbibed in
her youth ("God must fall in every shape" cried John Henry
Mackay). In my early days as an "anarcho-communist" I found her
writings both inspiring and sufficiently disturbing to implant in
my thinking a seed of doubt about my championing of this
contradiction in terms that later formed part of a blossoming of
anarchist individualism. In Paul Avrich she has found an able
biographer whose pages bring her to life once more.
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